...and that should be taken into consideration as a worthwhile and informative contribution as well. (I obviously didn't bother reading it the first time for previously stated "reasons.")

Century Media was forthcoming that Voivod's newest album "Target Earth" was cut from the same master as the CD. I got this through a reviewer who inquired for me and in whom I trust. (As a result I bought the CD instead of waiting for the costlier and more pressing error-prone vinyl release.) I also hear other "professionals" (I know, it's hard to prove credentials on the 'net where everyone's a Google-expert) state that it is most common to work with 24-bit files.

Whether "it matters" or not is relevant too and I admit I've been mistaken and misunderstood that in the past. I just think it would be fun to challenge this "it happens all the time" stuff that gets thrown around like it's fact. Slightly OT: this sort of thing reminds me of the oft-repeated and accepted line "vinyl masters cost money and most artists/studios won't go to the expense" and "it would state on the record as a big deal if it was mastered differently." None of my very obvious examples, including the Woods of Ypres one you even admitted, has such a sticker or indication. In fact, I have three copies of that album (and the CD) and one is still in the shrink-wrap I could submit as photographic proof. I'm know they sometimes advertise the vinyl that way, but none of my LPs were promoted as such.

Like I said: I'll cover some metal labels like Earache, CM, etc. I think we'd have better luck getting responses from labels that aren't too big, but any similar enthusiasm/effort sans the usual confrontation (I accept that I am at least equally guilty) would be welcome IMO.

In the interest of fairness I am aware of certain vinyl within the metal genre that was cut from lossy encodes as well.

The Krisiun album (Century Media) that I presented in this thread was actually recorded to analogue tape according to the parties involved in the recording process. (What I don't know is if that same tape was used to cut the vinyl...I'm guessing at some point it could have been digitized.) Also the dynamic range of the LP version is very obviously different from the CD.

Perhaps, though once again I really must call into question the mechanism that causes the difference. The spectral content of the peaks you seem to so highly covet in the LP version of this specific title is quite ugly. I seriously doubt they exist on the analog tape this way. In fact I would not be the least bit surprised that the CD version is a more faithful presentation, both audibly and in the visual appearance of the waveforms. I haven't listened yet but I have a feeling that the LP version will contain the same type of audible distortion that I revealed the last time I auditioned a pair of your samples.

I thought compact discs are limited to around 65,000 volume variations, am I wrong?

You absolutely cannot hear the difference between 65,000 and 65,001. And, that's not only because it's a small percentage change. You cannot hear a 100% change between "1" & "2" on a CD either, because you simply cannot hear any sounds that quiet (and no-fair cranking-up the volume to the point where the rest of the CD is unlistenable.)

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To me vinyl with all its noise still sounds more alive with its more than a million possible different volume levels....

Noise is exactly the problem with your analysis. Accepting your "resolution" of one million, let's pretend you can get a signal-to noise ratio of 60 dB. That's 1/1000, or 1000 out of a million, or 65 out of 65,000. In the real world, your SNR on a good vinyl recording and a good system is probably closer to 40dB or 10 times worse!

Precision is useless without accuracy, and noise kills your accuracy. I can easily use some multiplication and randomness to get more than one million different values out of a CD. My "analog" tape measure may have "infinite resolution" but my digital caliper is more accurate.

It's fine if you prefer vinyl or if it "sounds better" or "more alive" to you. That's a matter of personal prefrence. But that's NOT because vinyl has more resolution... It has less, and it's technically inferior (in terms of noise, distortion, and frequency response)..

...The spectral content of the peaks you seem to so highly covet in the LP version of this specific title is quite ugly. I haven't listened yet but I have a feeling that they will contain the same type of audible distortion that I revealed the last time I auditioned a pair of your samples. I seriously doubt they exist on the analog tape this way. In fact I would not be the least bit surprised that the CD version is a more faithful presentation, both audibly and in the visual appearance of the waveforms.

Not trying to backpedal but my cartridge on that was the stock OM5 that came with last-gen Debut III's. I'm actually having a friend re-record that title for me on his (impressive) set-up. It sounded (to me) pleasing and better than the CD on my home stereo and car stereo. I've been listening to some of those examples on headphones and noticing that this cart seems to be emphasizing quite a bit of treble at the seeming expense of the midrange. (I wonder how long it would have taken me to realize my cart sucks if I hadn't gotten so critical.) I don't know if that affects the peaks and distortion or not...but I guess it should be "good enough" for someone more knowledgable to get to the bottom of it.

If I remember correctly the DR Meter gave it a "12," but as David(2BDecided) fairly demonstrated in that thread, that thing can apparently be tricked as well.

As a sidenote and since there's more than one direction this thread is going at the moment: I'm in no way in agreement with anything paul46 is putting forth. I know it gets tiring to have to keep addressing the same issues like the ones he brought up, but we're all at different levels of understanding I guess. (That's more addressed to myself and my own lack of patience and generally being a dick sometimes.)

I also hear other "professionals" (I know, it's hard to prove credentials on the 'net where everyone's a Google-expert) state that it is most common to work with 24-bit files.

“work with” is something else than “distribute as”. There are good reasons to work in a 24 bits domain.

If they hae finalized the mix to a 24-bit file and feed it right into the cutter (assuming they are using one which accepts digital inputs), but for the CD dither it down to 16 bits; are they then two different masters? Technically you may argue that they are different digital files, but in reality it only amounts to adapting the same file to each format; CD by converting to 16 bits, LP by a RIAA EQ and a DAC. A very mechanical form of a DAC.

I thought compact discs are limited to around 65,000 volume variations, am I wrong?

You absolutely cannot hear the difference between 65,000 and 65,001. And, that's not only because it's a small percentage change. You cannot hear a 100% change between "1" & "2" on a CD either, because you simply cannot hear any sounds that quiet (and no-fair cranking-up the volume to the point where the rest of the CD is unlistenable.)

This omits something that cannot be stated enough. greynol already introduced this, but perhaps it bears a slight elaboration. Once the signal is reconstructed by the DAC (assuming it’s not abysmally made hardware), the volume will not be limited to the 65536 ‘stairsteps’, and therefore the naÔve idea that the actual output signal is hopelessly constrained to 65536 steps is totally false. Asserting anything about the quality of digital based upon the unreconstructed signal is completely invalid and, again, indicates a lack of any effort to educate oneself before presenting an opinion.

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It's fine if you prefer vinyl or if it "sounds better" or "more alive" to you. That's a matter of personal prefrence.

Actually, it’s not fine if that perception is not backed up by valid testing and is presented here. There’s personal preference, and then there’s the placebo effect. We don’t want the latter. The type of personal preference that is relevant to vinyl in that sense is an acknowledgement of its limitations but nonetheless liking the unique distortions, etc. introduced by the medium. Spurious conclusions caused by expectation bias need not apply.

QUOTE ([JAZ] @ Mar 17 2013, 09:49)

Isn't this the perfect example where to show Monty's "Xiph, Episode 2" to teach someone what a digital signal actually is?

Porcus already linked episode 1, but sure, thanks for this. Hopefully it will put these misconceptions even further to rest, and the two of you won’t need to do any more work on paul46’s behalf. Xiph’s presentations are fantastic, so I do hope they achieve their intended purpose to educate here.

This omits something that cannot be stated enough. greynol already introduced this, but perhaps it bears a slight elaboration. Once the signal is reconstructed by the DAC (assuming itís not abysmally made hardware), the volume will not be limited to the 65536 Ďstairstepsí, and therefore the naÔve idea that the actual output signal is hopelessly constrained to 65536 steps is totally false.

On-sample, yes, but not every bit of the signal; reconstructed between-sample information has no such restriction. I was trying to head off any allegation that the stair-steps seen in naÔvely drawn waveforms on a screen are at all representative of whatís actually output after reconstruction.

Anyway, no one is going to be able to tell the difference between 16-bit and anything higher on input material that hasnít been amplified or artificially designed with the express purpose of showing up the format. In this context, 65536 steps on-sample are perfectly adequate.

On-sample, yes, but not every bit of the signal; reconstructed between-sample information has no such restriction.

True, it doesn't - but this fact gives you no more amplitude resolution in the original signal, and therefore no more amplitude resolution in the reconstructed output.

Perceived amplitude resolution beyond the quantisation step size is due to dither, and the way our ears work. It has absolutely nothing to do with the reconstruction filter. With an ideal amplifier and speaker, it would work equally well without a reconstruction filter.

You need the reconstruction filter to give you a nice graph to show people in a video like monty's, and to avoid ultrasonics that may have undesirable effects in real equipment - but beyond that, it makes absolutely no difference to what people hear. The ear already includes a perfectly acceptable low pass filter.

(anti-alias filtering at A>D is vital though).

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I was trying to head off any allegation that the stair-steps seen in naÔvely drawn waveforms on a screen are at all representative of whatís actually output after reconstruction.

In terms of amplitude resolution, it wouldn't matter if they were. You would have to low pass filter it for cutting vinyl though!

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Anyway, no one is going to be able to tell the difference between 16-bit and anything higher on input material that hasnít been amplified or artificially designed with the express purpose of showing up the format. In this context, 65536 steps on-sample are perfectly adequate.

Digital has potential to perform better than vinyl but currently the CD format is 16 bit by 44.1 kHz which allows for only sixty five thousand different volume levels. A vinyl record has limited volume variations based on the master recording which is usually 24 bit by 196 kHz with millions of volume variations. Someone needs to bring that kind of quality to the consumer and then vinyl would be surpassed.

CD already surpasses vinyl. 24bit/196Khz doesn't make any audible difference in audio quality. 16bit/44.1Khz is enough for music unless somebody can prove otherwise.

Not unless someone can demonstrate it in a carefully controlled, level-matched and time-synchronized double-blind test. Even if someone can demonstrate a difference for a specific piece of audio, this does absolutely nothing, let me reiterate, absolutely nothing in lending even a modicum of credence to the notion that an audible benefit will be obtained from vinyl specifically because it was sourced from a hi-res signal.

Are you actually reading the replies or are you just putting your fingers in your ears repeating to yourself, "I'm not listening; I can't hear you!"? There have been quite a few posts since the one you quoted.

It will have a higher resolution. It is highly unlikely to be of audible higher quality in a comparison between properly produced Blu-ray and CDDA versions of the same master of the same material. Bigger numbers donít mean anything for audible quality. Talk of quality is irrelevant beyond the threshold of transparency for any given combination of material and user. Once you canít discern between a stream and its original source (e.g. master), thatís 100% quality as far as audibility is concerned, and big numbers arenít relevant at all. Donít be fooled into believing they are by marketing or subjective reports from highly impressionable users elsewhere.

It will have a higher resolution. It is highly unlikely to be of audible higher quality in a comparison between properly produced Blu-ray and CDDA versions of the same master of the same material.

It need not even have higher resolution? Blu-ray is supposed to have a 640 kb/s AC3, and it need not have any other audio stream?

I watched Prometheus on Blu-Ray with audio going to my receiver with HDMI cable. The audio track on this movie is DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1, I don't know how many kb/s it is but Wikipedia says DTS-HD Master Audio is lossless audio that is 24.5 Mbit/s and is capable of 8 channels with either 48kHz or 96kHz and 16 or 24 bit sample or six channels of audio with 192kHz and 16 bit or 24 bit sample.

I note how youíre able to reel off another bunch of meaningless statistics but not to actually respond to what people have said about the inaccuracy of your claims that vinyl or post-CD digital media are intrinsically superior to CD in an audible sense. Thatís keeping in mind the total difference between those two things, as greynol noted, which makes your conflation of them seem a bit too much like a diversionary tactic to me, as if the off-topic replies didnít perform that role already. None of this is helping to advance your original point. Again, and as greynol has also already said before, are you going to participate in the discussion, or are you just going to keep throwing up road-blocks and hope we donít notice?

I note how youíre able to reel off another bunch of meaningless statistics but not to actually respond to what people have said about the inaccuracy of your claims that vinyl or post-CD digital media are intrinsically superior to CD in an audible sense. Thatís keeping in mind the total difference between those two things, as greynol noted, which makes your conflation of them seem a bit too much like a diversionary tactic to me, as if the off-topic replies didnít perform that role already. None of this is helping to advance your original point. Again, and as greynol has also already said before, are you going to participate in the discussion, or are you just going to keep throwing up road-blocks and hope we donít notice?

I was just simply answer a question one guy had, I never said mp3's were superior to CD's. I prefer buying used CD's on amazon and ripping them into iTunes. I do use this program called "bit perfect" that sets your computers digital out to match the bits in the song on iTunes and noticed it was setting my computer at 24 bits and 44.1 kHz for new iTunes tracks. Can an mp3 or AAC audio file be 24 bits? This would allow more steps in the final product over 16 bit. What is a good source to find out quality of master recordings for either vinyl or CD's?